


Jaya Fights With Her Brain

by yuutsuhime



Series: 東港 | Higashiminato [6]
Category: Original Work
Genre: Absent Parents, Character Study, Dissociation, Divorce, Experimental Style, Gen, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, Implied/Referenced Sex, Implied/Referenced Sexual Assault, Minor Character Death, Obsessive Behavior, Poetry, Sexual Confusion, Slice of Life, Suicide by Train, Witchcraft, Workplace Abuse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-10
Updated: 2017-05-10
Packaged: 2020-10-19 15:15:47
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,807
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20659310
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/yuutsuhime/pseuds/yuutsuhime
Summary: A free-form narrative poetry collection exploring the life of a 21-year old Japanese-American woman and her experiences with suicide, familial trauma, and queerness through a magically realist lens.





	Jaya Fights With Her Brain

**Author's Note:**

> Written while I was first realizing and accepting that I'm trans, traumatized, and mentally ill.
> 
> Jaya is 21, reflecting on her teenage years (15-17).

### Cast List

**JAYA**, a fifteen year old girl living in rural Hokkaido  
**JAYA'S MOTHER**, emotionally manipulative  
**JAYA'S FATHER**, moved back to Seattle  
**JAYA'S GRANDMOTHER**, uses a wheelchair  
**JAYA'S GRANDFATHER**, doesn't remember Jaya's name  
**KOUTA**, builds freaky robots to escape from toxic work culture  
**PRIYA**, a foreign exchange student who thinks about violence too much  
**RACHEL**, a therapist

  


### Persona

I like to pretend my mom is an alcoholic but  
maybe she just loves me in a way I don't  
understand. My dad doesn't live in  
Seattle. He just lies  
in the basement or at work and we're only really  
friends in Japan anyway. Pretend makes  
sense, like me being a pretend girl or being pretend  
happy. This is pretend.

  


### The Wish from Late May, 2016

When my grandma prays at the temple I  
think about survival; about wanting  
help. As in: I listen to the sounds of a ladder  
scoring the ground as a painter paints  
sweeps of red --- the paint from last year had  
already faded. They patched over the new tears  
in the sliding doors. We clap three times, ring  
the bell and close our eyes; crows cluster nearby  
and bathe in the holy water.

  


### Manifesto

Somewhere out at sea I decided to survive  
the storm.

  


### Jaya

  1. I want to fold thousands of paper cranes.  
Maybe the wish is to cut my fingers raw  
on slices of paper. Maybe the wish is the disgust  
on their (people's) faces, my hands  
dripping ink, daring to have created.

  2. I don't look before crossing  
the street, or walk carefully with  
scissors. I don't pass  
bridges without thinking of fall  
leaves swirling bright arrays  
of red into the valley. I don't like  
bridges.

  3. Do I look like how I should? Here I  
am spreading grime through my hair  
and across my chest; the drips coalesce  
and I am not ashamed.

  4. I think I would look good in a skirt  
if I wasn't so afraid  
of drowning.

  5. Puddles form after storms rain  
leaves into mats on the ground.  
I can dance sometimes when  
I'm alone.

  


### Rachel; or, Waiting for May 5th

which is to say I started a war, because Rachel  
believed me. The sides of her head were  
shaved but the rest was dyed blue, her ears  
were pierced and her pronouns were she  
and her like someone I think I want to know.  
As in I was surprised when my body fit  
in the chair. As in I don't believe her  
when she says I have a lot of self-doubt. As  
in my hands are shaking.

  


### Lucid Something

  1. I'm on a baseball court alone  
and people I love don't exist yet.

  2. In the future I can type quickly,  
my hands are a dance programmed  
with callouses and my boss says  
good job, puts a hand on my shoulder.  
I like this.

  3. In a storm at sea Chef teaches  
me to cook underwater. I smile  
as the sharks swim knots around  
our bodies.

  4. To kill a house cat you throw it off  
a bridge, watch its tail circle as it  
lands shattering all four paws.

  5. I write love poems to myself in blood;  
keep cups of it in my refrigerator. When  
the cups run out I bleed into the milk. Use  
it for cereal, drinks, fire, and sideways  
floors. 

  


### Butterflies

mean I killed my grandpa. He's still alive. I can  
talk to him but we don't speak the same language;  
he doesn't knock before he enters the bathroom.  
Distance is awkward

  * Grandpa watches television, nature programs;  
butterflies migrate too once a year.

  * I still can't speak Japanese.

A butterfly got caught in the car's grill when  
we drove grandpa to his therapy. When he stands  
he has shit all over his pants. My grandma covers  
the seat with a towel and we don't talk until  
we reach the station.

  


### Priya

a death positive person, I guess  
she doesn't know about self-harm.  
She stabs a straw into strawberry milk;  
my hands are fixed and thoughts  
are thoughts and positive means  
the dog on the way to school. She wagged her tail;  
Rachel, she'd said, and walked away. I mean  
the dog's owner. I don't know about  
owners now, hands maybe, thoughts probably  
won't intrude like the straw into a drink.

  1. Priya draws gore and now I'm thinking  
about running into the woods so that a pack  
of wolves tears me the fuck apart. Priya keeps  
talking about red paint. Some have better  
sheens; she says she gets the best shock out of  
the expensive ones. It's like nail polish.

  


### Death Jokes

where my colleagues complain about another suicide,  
as in my boss had a copy of the timetable in one hand  
and a pliers in the other. He said he'll peel off one of  
the driver's fingernails for every minute the train was late.

  1. Kouta wanted to know who it was. They had  
jumped at the station. Three minutes late. Some  
of the passengers took pieces home in their wallets  
as souvenirs.

  2. We call them "unexpected delays".

  


### Response to Death Jokes

We fought the management one day. I mean I didn't know Kouta very well because he was in the same suit and tie that the other men shared; Kouta thinks it's fine to keep using "he" for now and so I do. I wasn't sure if we were fighting the management because of the pliers or the jokes but we learned about the intern then; the guy who died and set us back three minutes was just a guy or a girl or a person who thought about train tracks instead of bridges like mine.

  


### No Fighting

I played soccer with a bunch of kids in the  
dust. I'm faster than them. They call me big  
sis and ask me to buy porn from convenience  
stores, since I'm old enough to question

  * Where mom gets money to buy alcohol.

  * How long dad is going to spend in Seattle before  
the capitalism swallows him whole.

I'm not supposed to ask questions that carry knives,  
just ones big enough to kick, as in normal households  
don't play games (fight) like this, I'm told.

  


### Dances with Trains

  1. She wants to sit alone so my fingers dance  
a ticket to first class, Hikari 468; she smiles.

  2. They take the bad typists out back and club  
them with broomsticks like the one I'd fly if  
I were a real witch. Kouta lost a tooth. He keeps  
it on a string on the keyboard, looks at it, sucks  
it in his mouth when he's stressed. He brings  
toothpaste in to work to wash it.

  3. A child was run over by a suitcase. We swept  
the bones up with brooms. Kouta wants to  
know why there were only bones but we cleaned  
the windows with Lysol and reloaded the  
timetables. A man from Germany wants  
to exchange Deutschmarks for yen and we  
let him. He asked me to suck his dick in the parking lot.

  4. I print my own ticket home at the end of the  
day and leave the money in my own register.

  


### School Trips

  1. I think they destroyed the cranes that Sadako  
folded but yet I've brought my own. It's funny,  
once I folded a thousand I forgot what I was wishing for.

  2. Priya wants to lay in the epicenter  
on her back. They said the waterways boiled  
but now there's just grass and a few koi fish.  
I keep crossing my arms with one elbow in each  
hand, scratching the skin on the bones with  
my nails. I don't know why this is happening.  
On the train back I have hives.

  3. Priya and I smoked pot and didn't die.  
She said she wanted to see space aliens.  
My body wants to walk on air over the courtyard  
but my hands can't climb the fence. We laugh a  
lot. She has to go back to India in a month. I grab  
her chest and neither of us know what's happening.

  


### Useful Education

where I met a guy I didn't like just to see how hard  
his abstinence could get; how I could finger the  
taste of his abstinence off my chest. We're told that  
porn will fuck your brain up, drugs will paralyze you;  
disabilities are something to be ashamed of. They said  
you'll die if you smoke pot. We don't talk about trans  
people because they're certain none of us are. We  
don't talk about everyday language because organic  
food and yoga are enough to cure depression (they  
mean words shouldn't hurt you). Later, my physics  
teacher joked about throwing objects off a bridge.

  


### Witchcraft

  1. I took the broom out of the garage after I threw  
out the new beer. Mom says I'm not doing a good  
job cleaning the house so I put calamine  
lotion on my scrapes and went back outdoors.  
I can sometimes get over the trees now. It's  
interesting: I spent so much time being scared  
of the fall and now I can slash the leaves off their  
branches myself, perch on the rusted ski lift and see  
the sun set over the harbor from above.  
I've never been more afraid of dying.

  2. I sit in the middle of the class with my  
head down and ridges bitten around  
my nails. Priya and I hold hands a lot which  
means I'm used to biting her nails too.  
She's mad about this, and also mad that  
I blew up the moon with the Destruction  
Spell I found in the library, but I told her  
that it's our world to destroy anyway.  
We flick our eyelashes together sometimes.

  3. Priya sent mail from India so I promised I'd  
deprogram the broom so she could build one too.  
We used friend words. She was looking forward  
to tenth grade and I was going in to eleventh.  
We never saw each other again.

  4. Rachel says I could still be a real witch,  
says I doubt myself too much and I trust  
Rachel. She wants to be realistic and talk  
about medication, says she noticed how  
I talked about self-harm on accident. She  
says I might remember how to fly if I drug  
myself and spend money, but I can only  
feel the shame in the custodian's eyes  
when he saw me after work with a broom  
between my legs. I always take the train.  
It's been five years now.

  


### (Accolades in) Human Starvation

in which I stop eating and listen to music  
instead. My body can float without  
its stomach anyway, like something Freudian; at  
least I went to school and the something missing  
wasn't my mind. School food is gross, and I lied  
about leaving my stomach on its own; I cut it  
out and left it in the yard to rot.

  1. I noticed dad left compost here so I  
filled his car with it and drove it across  
the ocean on a Skype call, so he could  
keep all his things. Mom doesn't want  
it either.

  2. I'm trying to derealize myself, as in fade  
out into the background of someone  
else's life, which is to say my  
mother drinks because she too can't  
keep all the drowned sparrows inside her.

  3. If it were up to me people would  
be soft and wear cotton, and robots like  
the other half of my brain wouldn't be  
so loud; I think I need to pay more  
attention in math.

  


### Rachel wants to talk about death

because I'm oversharing. I mean I talked to her  
about the silverfish. They crawl out of the vent  
while I'm sleeping, even when the heat is off.  
They land on my skin. Rachel wants to talk about  
the thousands and thousands of microscopic mites  
in my pillow; I mean my bed is like their graveyard;  
I smashed the silverfish with a paper towel instead  
of taking it outside. I don't like going outside. There  
are so many bugs. I mean it's not actually about the  
bugs; can you see me, see the silver in my eyes and  
the wings I'm keeping under the back of this shirt?

  


### The Intern, or Kouta says (A story about healing)

Kouta says he wanted to grow up to pilot a Gundam, and I laughed and told him we're adults and fantasy like witchcraft doesn't exist. He says he could engineer a train into a Gundam and fly us into better jobs. How much do they pay to kill dragons?

Kouta says the intern is dead. He means the intern was working, as in checking tickets, and the not working, as in dead. We can't find all of the intern and Kouta says he wants to get Starbucks on the drive home. Kouta and I don't sleep.

At night we talk about dragons. We're interested in finding out how to get rid of them. Rachel wants me to take more medicine because she's being paid off by the pharmaceutical industry, which Kouta says is being run by the biggest dragon in the whole world. He says this with his head pressed against the pillow. We're blowing each other's hair with each other's breath. Kouta says: Jaya, you know, we could probably take over the world together, you know, and enact the socialist dream. I mean it would rain medicine that worked for free and everyone would get eight hours of sleep. I smile at him and tell him the pimple on his chin looks cute. He has thick eyelashes and we've stopped doing our jobs well now, a few weeks later; I mean we talk a lot when we aren't asleep.

Kouta says he started smuggling train parts back to the apartment to build the Gundam. I don't know where it is – he says it's a secret; he'll show it to me when he's done. The kitchen counters are always covered in power tools now. I mean he doesn't believe in god, only dragons; I'm playing along and brought out the old books with pictures of monsters that were stashed in the bottom of the shelf with my other witch stuff. I didn't even know that I kept these, but Kouta says he thinks it's cute. Calls me a fucking chuunibyou. He thinks we're living in an anime but he's working hard; gets this big stupid smile on his face when I tell him his cup ramen's been done in the microwave for six minutes.

The Intern is still dead. We propped the body up by the wall and put some headphones on the ears. The intern listens to lots of podcasts. Management thinks the intern is becoming problematic – I mean they're worried about how he's doing a worse job than Kouta and me, and one day his body was finally gone. It had snowed in the station; I mean it had snowed inside of the station building and nowhere else. Someone built a snowman next to the ticket checker and Kouta was in his winter coat despite management's orders. We taped some construction paper over the televisions because the forecast still said thirty-four Celsius and sunny. The intern's footsteps swirled down the platform to the boarding line at the first car, and the conductor said he'd gotten on at eight forty-five in the morning, sharp as always, with a ticket to Aomori. We didn't know the intern lived that far away. Kouta threw a snowball at my face.

  


### A lot changed since I blew up the Moon

not that Dad noticed. He produced an amused  
grunt and a few more typing sounds. That's how  
Seattle works; there's a constant sound of typing  
all the time. It follows you if you return, like the  
sound of the ocean stuck in seashells.

  1. My teacher wants to talk about reality, so I pointed  
out the window at the non-exploded Moon I put  
there that morning as a substitute. Of course I know  
what's real, I said. I mean this is just an elaborate  
role play, like even the depression is just pretend,  
I just want attention because I'm lonely or something.

  2. I've been thinking about facades a lot. I mean Mom  
doesn't want me to move out now because Grandpa  
and Grandma are moving in and they want to spend  
time with me, not realizing the Moon is fake. I mean  
they're not old enough to recognize every faker,  
right? Sometimes I get up on the broom and hide  
behind the dull, two-dimensional substitute Moon.  
It's hanging in the sky really well for something made  
out of cardboard in the garage.

  


### Jaya, Part Two

  1. I am romantic, I think. As in I think about three  
in the morning and uneaten food. I hate  
waste.

  2. I fold a few more paper cranes before bed.  
I'm learning not to fight myself. They float  
down to the ground, lightly, like leaves.

  3. Waiting for the train, my mind sits still  
for once. I'm not sure where this one goes.  
I'm smiling.

**Author's Note:**

> I submitted this collection as my final portfolio for a university class, alongside a statement of poetics that I've shared here as [Author Commentary](https://archiveofourown.org/works/25062700).


End file.
